Clare M. Lopez, Christine Brim, Roland Peer
The Center for Security Policy today released a groundbreaking longitudinal study, Religious Bias Crimes against Muslim, Jewish and Christian Victims: American Trends from 2000-2009, based on statistics reported by the FBI. The study contradicts the false assertions that hate crimes against Muslims have increased, and that the alleged cause is widespread Islamophobia in America. In fact, the study shows that hate crimes against Muslim Americans, measured by the categories of incidents, offenses or victims, have remained relatively low with a downward trend since 2001. For example, in 2009, Jewish victims of hate crimes outnumbered Muslim victims by more than 8 to 1 (1,132 Jewish victims to 132 Muslim victims). From 2000 through 2009, for every one hate crime incident against a Muslim, there were six hate crime incidents against Jewish victims (1,580 Muslim incidents versus 9,692 Jewish incidents). Even in 2001, total anti-Muslim incidents, offenses and victims remained approximately half of the corresponding anti-Jewish totals.
The study provides hard data that disproves the counter-factual statements made by a small number of highly vocal Muslim lobbying groups, many linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as leftwing activists.
Citing these false assumptions concerning Americas alleged Islamophobia and a supposed rising trend in hate crimes against Muslim Americans, these organizations have argued against the March 10, 2011 House Committee on Homeland Security hearings on Muslim American radicalization. The study shows that these arguments against the hearings are not based on facts, but rather on a political agenda.
Frank Gaffney, President of Center for Security Policy remarked:
This report is important because it exposes a false belief perpetuated by a few vocal groups that religious bias crimes against Muslims are on the upswing. The truth is quite the opposite. These arguments, unsubstantiated by hard factual data, are corrosive to community relationships at every level of American society, and a potential threat to national security.
Note: This Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper is available as a PDF, or is reprinted below.
Religious Bias Crimes against Muslim, Jewish and Christian Victims: American Trends from 2000-2009
Clare M. Lopez, Roland Peer & Christine Brim
Introduction
Misperceptions about religious bias hate crimes in America are widespread. This study is a longitudinal comparison of religious bias hate crimes, as reported by the FBI, from the pre-9/11 year of 2000 through 2009, the most recent year for which statistics were available.[1] The assertion that religious bias hate crimes against one group in particular, Muslims in America, have proliferated in the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001 has gained acceptance within media and government, thanks to a steady drumbeat of assertions to this effect from a small but vocal group of advocacy organizations.
Internationally, the most aggressive of these is the 57 member state Organization of the Islamic Conference, with its so-called "Islamophobia Observatory." In the U.S., the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)[2] and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC)[3] have taken the lead in issuing claims that discrimination and religious bias hate crimes against Muslims are increasing.[4] These organizations have also asserted that "Islamophobia" and statements critical of Islam, Shariah law, or political Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood may be linked to the alleged rise in hate crimes. Alternatively, counterterrorism expert Steve Emerson has suggested "In advancing the notion that government policy has resulted in an undeserved backlash against ordinary Muslims, CAIR seeks to muster opposition to the anti-terror laws it finds objectionable."[5]
To inform this public debate about religious bias hate crimes in America, the Center for Security Policy analyzed data from 2000 through 2009 for three FBI-identified victim groups: Jews, Muslims, and Christians (a combined statistic for the purposes of this whitepaper, combining separate FBI data for Catholics and Protestants). The source of all the religion bias crimes information cited in the following report is the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program,[6] which collects crime statistics on an annual basis and presents them online. Appendices B-T at the end of this report present those official FBI statistics in tables and charts showing the comparative incidence of religious hate crimes for Christians, Jews, and Muslims from 2000-2009.
The results may prove surprising to those who took CAIR or MPAC spokesmen at their word. For example, in 2009[7], in totals for a combined five categories of hate crime, from Simple Assault to Crimes Against Property, Jewish victims of hate crimes by religion outnumbered Muslim victims by more than 8 to 1 (1,132 Jewish victims to 132 Muslim victims). Nor is 2009 an anomalous year in terms of these numbers. Across the decade, from 2000 through 2009, Jewish victims of hate crimes by religion outnumbered their Christian and Muslim counterparts, with the exception of a nine-week period following the 9/11 terrorist acts for two categories of bias crimes: simple and aggravated assaults statistics.[8] From 2000 through 2009, for every one hate crime incident against a Muslim, there were six hate crime incidents against Jewish victims (1,580 Muslim incidents versus 9,692 Jewish incidents).
The Center for Security Policy presents this study to inform the dialogue surrounding religious bias crimes in the U.S. and to provide a fact-based resource that analysts, researchers, and citizens can use for a reality check.
Prior Research
Although a number of European academics and institutes (particularly the British[9]) have produced studies on the general topic of "Islamophobia" in the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, few Americans have tackled "hate crimes" from the objective perspective of a neutral academic and empirical study based on the available FBI statistics. Two studies are representative, though unlike our study, neither is a longitudinal study encompassing a ten-year period.
Jeffrey Kaplan, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh authored a report entitled, "Islamophobia in America?: September 11 and Islamophobic Hate Crime."[10] Although this report does reference FBI hate crime statistics, it does so only for the period from 2000-2002, as Kaplan's study focus is that period of time just after the September 11 attacks on the U.S. He concludes that "The intense phase of these attacks comprised approximately nine weeks, after which the number of hate crimes fell sharply" due, he writes, to national leadership from the U.S. president, decisive law enforcement intervention, grassroots outreach to Muslim communities across the country, and a "rapid dissolution of American moral certainty about the War on Terror."
In other research, Steven George Salaita produced a study for the New Centennial Review in the Fall of 2006 which set out to "summarize the evolution of the Arab image in American media since Ronald Stockton's seminal 1994 analysis, with emphasis on the role of 9/11, and advance the usage of the term anti-Arab racism as a more accurate replacement for the traditional descriptors Orientalism and Islamophobia in relation to the negative portrayal of Arabs in the United States."[11] Unlike our study, the author approached the topic with a non-empirical framework.
Scholarly research in the area of hate crimes is increasingly a popular area for specialization, as witnessed by the Journal of Hate Studies, celebrating its 8th Volume in 2010.[12] A useful short review of the field's scope - though unfortunately not addressing a longitudinal analysis nor the FBI data - can be found in Barbara Perry's essay, "The more things change...post-9/11 trends in hate crime scholarship," a summary of the various disciplines' research addressing the issue of hate.[13]
Methodology and Findings
The "Religious Bias Crimes in America" study is a longitudinal look at the instances of religious bias crimes, also known as hate crimes, against Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the United States from 2000 to 2009. The use of the term "Hate Crime" is defined by the FBI in its 1996 Training Guide for Hate Crime Data Collection[14] as well as in its Uniform Crime Reporting Program,[15] which find their authorization in the April 23, 1990 "Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990."[16] This legislation requires the U.S. Department of Justice to compile and publish an annual summary of data about crimes that "manifest prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity." This study focuses on those hate crimes that clearly demonstrate prejudice based on bias against Christians (Catholics and Protestants combined), Jews and Muslims, as identified by the FBI. Three other categories of religious bias crime for which the FBI collects statistics, but which were not included in this study because they are less specific for purposes of comparison are: anti-other religion, anti-multi-religious group, and anti-atheism-agnosticism.
The Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines define a bias crime:
A criminal offense committed against a person or property which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin; also known as Hate Crime.
Definitions of the various offenses against person and property are also provided in the Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines.[17]
Three broad categories of religious hate crimes are included in this study: incidents, offenses, and victims. A single incident may include more than one offense (for example, intimidation and robbery). An offense may have more than one victim. A victim may be the target of more than one offense. Data categories for offenses and victims are sub-divided between crimes against persons, and crimes against property. Each of these sub-categories is further broken down by specific types of crimes. For example, crimes against persons include 1) murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, 2) forcible rape, 3) simple assault, 4) aggravated assault, 5) intimidation (by far the largest crimes against persons category), and 6) other. Crimes against property include 1) robbery, 2) burglary, 3) larceny/theft, 4) motor vehicle theft, 5) arson, 6) destruction/damage/vandalism (by far the largest crimes against property category), and 7) other. A third category, crimes against society, (at the same hierarchical level as crimes against persons, and crimes against property) presented only insignificant numbers for all three religions in the study (19 victims for all three religious groups from all ten years combined - see Appendix C, Table 2).
While there has been a slight variation through the years, anti-Jewish hate crimes have hovered around 70% of total anti-religious hate crime, while anti-Muslim violence has accounted for around 10%, and anti-Christian hate crime has totaled slightly less than 10%. Jewish and Muslim populations in America, as noted previously, each are estimated at 6 million persons (with an alternate estimate by Pew for the Muslim population). There was an increase in anti-Muslim violence in 2001 (exceeding both Jewish and Christian rates for simple and aggravated assault), which decreased to the 10% range in 2002, where it has remained (a temporary smaller spike was seen in 2006 against both Jewish and Muslim victims). Even in the anomalous year of 2001, total anti-Muslim incidents, offenses, and number of victims were approximately half of the corresponding anti-Jewish totals (Muslim Incidents - 481, Victims - 546, Offenses - 554; Jewish Incidents - 1043, Victims - 1117, Offenses - 1196). That the terrorist attacks occurred relatively late in the year - in September of 2001 - suggests that the increase in anti-Muslim violence occurred over a period of a few weeks, or more specifically nine weeks as noted in Kaplan's study. Looking at total numbers of victims over the 2000-2009 period, for every Muslim victim from 2000 to 2009, there have been over six (6.13) Jewish incidents of hate crimes. As noted previously, in 2009 the ratio increased: for every Muslim victim, there were even more - over 8 - Jewish victims.
Most anti-religious hate crimes in the United States are not of a violent nature against persons. Aggregating anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Jewish hate crimes against persons and property from 2000 to 2009[18], demonstrates that 64% of total hate crimes are crimes against property, and of these, 92% are cases of destruction/damage/vandalism, and the majority of the remaining 8% are burglary and larceny/theft. There have been 38 robbery offenses, or 0.3% of total hate crimes and of these, 23 were anti-Jewish. The rate of arson is very small, accounting for slightly more than 1% of total crimes against property.
Of the remaining 36% of total cases that are crimes against persons, most (77%) are classified as intimidation. Virtually all of the other 23% are simple or aggravated assault. There were no rape cases and only one murder, of a Jewish victim. There was an increase in 2006 in anti-Muslim aggravated assault (24 offenses), compared to 22 anti-Jewish offenses, and in 2009 (11 vs. 9). There were no similar spikes in cases of simple assault, and in other years, anti-Jewish aggravated and simple assault cases are double that of anti-Muslim assault cases. While cases of anti-Jewish aggravated assault decreased between 2008 and 2009 from 25 to 9, anti-Jewish simple assault cases increased sharply from 58 to 82. When compared to the overall population of over 300 million people, anti-religious hate crimes are not highly prevalent in the United States for any religious group. Bias-motivated crime is simply not that common for any religious group in the U.S.
Comparing the prevalence of anti-religious hate crimes by religion requires measuring the number of incidents against the overall population of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the United States. Self-identified Christians accounted in 2008 for 76% of the adult American population[19], or 173,402,000 persons, significantly higher than for Muslims or Jews, and therefore the relative prevalence of anti-Christian crimes is by far the lowest of the three. Muslim groups in the U.S. such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), with an interest in presenting the U.S. Muslim population as equivalent to the Jewish one, repeatedly have declared the number of Muslims in the U.S. to be about 6 million persons, ,[20] Within the same range, Chicago Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, the 2010 Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions' Board of Trustees Chairman, has cited 2001 estimates of 5.8 million and 6.7 million Muslims in America.[21] On February 3, 2011, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) similarly cited "the reality of 6 million Muslims."[22] A lower estimate was published by the Pew Research Center in January 2011, when it put the Muslim population of the U.S. at 2.6 million.[23] The 2010 US Census estimates the Jewish population in the United States to be 6.5 million, or 2.1% of the total population in 2009, and this includes those who self-define as Jewish either by religion, ethnicity, or culture. [24] This broad definition thus can be seen as defining an upper boundary for the U.S. Jewish population, given that the FBI hate crime statistics define Judaism as a religion.
The Facts Contradict the Myths
These findings seem to contradict the popular perception that Muslims face more discrimination than Jews in the United States. For example, a Pew poll conducted in 2009 found that 58% of Americans believe there is "a lot of discrimination against" Muslims, opposed to 35% who thought the same for Jews. [25] FBI statistics do show a lower percentage of anti-Jewish hate crimes have identified offenders, which may contribute to the misperception that anti-Jewish hate crimes in the United States are not as prevalent as they really are. Of total known offenders from the period of 2000 to 2009, 56% committed anti-Jewish hate crimes; the number rises to 67% when unknown offenders are included.
The process of local law enforcement data collection and categorization is inconsistent and both over-reporting and under-reporting may occur[26]. The goal of our analysis is to show the relative frequency of hate crimes, by religion and by type.
We have looked at primarily at some summary statistics for this report. In addition, we include the tables here as appendices along with a selection of charts. The spreadsheet data tables and charts are available for download in excel format at securefreedom.org.
Hate Crime Rhetoric
Concerns about a backlash against Muslims in America arose in the aftermath of 9/11 and were given added impetus by books, studies, and other publications and statements by various organizations and Muslim leadership figures and groups. The November 2002 report by Human Rights Watch, "We Are Not the Enemy: Hate Crimes Against Arabs, Muslims, and Those Perceived to be Arab or Muslim after September 11"[27] is representative of the genre. Citing a "severe wave of backlash violence" involving "more than two thousand September 11-related backlash incidents" against Arabs and Muslims in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, the report claims such people were targeted "solely because they shared or were perceived as sharing the national background or religion of the hijackers and al-Qaeda members deemed responsible for attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."[28] Although the report goes on to claim that "comprehensive and reliable national statistics are not available," this study cites the readily-available official FBI statistics that indeed do show a spike from 28 to 481 total hate crimes against Muslims between the years 2000 and 2001; however, according to the FBI figures, even that high mark is exceeded by a factor of two for the typical annual total of hate crimes against Jews in America.[29]
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